Quickie Knit Charting

I was surfing the net yesterday trying to find a quick way to mock up a lace chart for a swatch and found Knitting Chart Maker.
"This wasn't here before," I thought--I've searched pretty regularly for knitting chart makers and I knew I hadn't seen this one... It turns out, Jaquie--the knitting Java programmer who launched it, just put it out there on June 10th, as she says "It is free to use how ever you want - my gift to knitters everywhere :-)" Yeah Jaquie! (click on the picture to see the full-size chart on flickr)

The applet has some pretty cool features for a web-based program including Undo (which she calls Tink, clever gal), select, cut, and paste, so you don't have to create every stitch of every chart.

Jaquie hopes to add charts for color knitting soon--wouldn't that be fun! Maybe if we send her enough feedback, she'll also add crochet symbols!

Creating my simple chart was easy--all the symbols I needed were there. A couple of great features--the chart keeps track of your stitch count, so you can now if you've added too many yarn overs or decreases, also you can set the size of grid that you want before or during the chart creation process. The whole thing is intuitive and easy to use. When you click over to the program, scroll down to read the how-to section and a comprehensive (huge!) feature list.

What's missing so far?

There's a "special" * symbol you can use, but no way to define it in the chart key. I'd like a text box so you can describe the special symbol in words

Also, there's no way to export the resulting chart--right now Jaquie advises you take a screen shot of the chart and save it. This is easy on the Mac--Apple includes a program called Grab with the OS that lets you take a "picture" of the whole screen, a specific window, or even a selection. (And as Jaquie says in her comment, below, PCs actually have a "Prnt Scrn" button on the keyboard that copies your whole screen into the computer's clipboard. But built-in exporting and printing would be nice.

Jaquie--thanks so much for this gift to the knitting world--it's much appreciated!

TECHNICAL UPDATE: AmyP says when she tried to run the program in Firefox (on a mac) it didn't work. I had the same experience, and figured at first that the program was not compatible with Firefox. But I came back and tried it again later, and it worked fine. So there is a bug there, but it seems you can work around it.

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